The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

by Annie Murphy Paul

“How quickly we guess how someone has come by his ideas,” Nietzsche slyly observed, “whether it was while sitting in front of his inkwell, with a pinched belly, his head bowed low over the paper—in which case we are quickly finished with his book, too! Cramped intestines betray themselves—you can bet on that—no less than closet air, closet ceilings, closet narrowness.”

Nietzsche, he reminds us, wrote that we should “sit as little as possible; do not believe any idea that was not born in the open air and of free movement.”

embodied cognition, which explores the role of the body in our thinking:

situated cognition, which examines the influence of place on our thinking:

distributed cognition, which probes the effects of thinking with others—such

Thinking outside the brain means skillfully engaging entities external to our heads—the feelings and movements of our bodies, the physical spaces in which we learn and work, and the minds of the other people around us—drawing them into our own mental processes. By reaching beyond the brain to recruit these “extra-neural” resources, we are able to focus more intently, comprehend more deeply, and create more imaginatively—to entertain ideas that would be literally unthinkable by the brain alone.

The human brain is limited in its ability to pay attention, limited in its capacity to remember, limited in its facility with abstract concepts, and limited in its power to persist at a challenging task.

Interoception is, simply stated, an awareness of the inner state of the body.

The practice of affect labeling, like the body scan, is a kind of mental training intended to get us into the habit of noting and naming the sensations that arise in our bodies. Psychologists recommend keeping two things in mind as we try it out. The first is to be as prolific as possible: the UCLA scientists reported that study participants who came up with a larger number of terms for what they were feeling subsequently experienced a greater reduction in their physiological arousal. The second is to be as granular as possible: that is, to choose words that are precise and specific when describing what we feel.

we can choose to reappraise debilitating “stress” as productive “coping.”

“No scientist thinks in equations,” Einstein once claimed. Rather, he remarked, the elements of his own thought were “visual” and even “muscular” in nature.